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Following the COVID-19 outbreak, the health sector is undergoing a deep transformation that is increasingly pushing it towards the exploitation of technology, thus fostering the growth of digital health (eHealth). Cellular networks play a pivotal role in promoting the digitalization of healthcare, and researchers are banking on beyond fifth-generation (B5G) and sixth-generation (6G) technologies to reach the turning point, given that, according to forecasts, 5G will not be able to meet future expectations. Security is an aspect that definitely should not be overlooked for the success of eHealth to occur. This work aims to address the security issue from a poorly explored viewpoint, namely that of economics. In this paper, we first describe the main eHealth services, highlighting the key stakeholders involved. Then, we discuss how next-generation technologies could support these services to identify possible business relationships and, therefore, to realize an innovative business-oriented security analysis. A qualitative assessment of the impact of specific security breaches in diverse business conditions is provided. Moreover, we examine a case study in order to show the effects of security attacks in a definite scenario and discuss their impact on business dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has shed light on the urgency of bridging the digital divide to guarantee equity in the fruition of different services by all citizens. The inability to access the digital world may be due to a lack of network infrastructure, which we refer to as service-delivery divide, or to the physical conditions, handicaps, age, or digital illiteracy of the citizens, that is mentioned as service-fruition divide. In this paper, we discuss the way how future sixth-generation (6G) systems can remedy actual limitations in the realization of a truly digital world. Hence, we introduce the key technologies for bridging the digital gap and show how they can work in two use cases of particular importance, namely eHealth and education, where digital inequalities have been dramatically augmented by the pandemic. Finally, considerations about the socio-economical impacts of future 6G solutions are drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The forthcoming fifth generation (5G) networks are claimed to deliver the large amount of traffic generated by the huge number of heterogeneous devices that constitute the Internet of Things (IoT). This unprecedented volume of both human- and machine-generated traffic to be managed imposes 5G network operators to move the focus from throughput-optimized to energy-efficiency-optimized resource allocation solutions. Device-to-device (D2D) communications are recognized as an effective offloading technique that the 5G network can exploit to boost the capacity and energy efficiency of future 5G networks. In this paper, we design a technique to efficiently deliver multicast traffic in a 5G New Radio (NR) network by exploiting the benefits of D2D communication and single-frequency operation in order to improve the overall network energy efficiency. In the designed solution, the subset of devices in better channel conditions are served through a conventional multicast transmission, while cell-edge devices receive the multicast service from relay nodes that simultaneously transmit in D2D mode the same content. The dimension of the multicast serving area and the set of D2D connections to establish are chosen in order to maximize the overall network energy efficiency. Performed simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution under varying frame configurations and number of multicast devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Future fifth-generation (5G) cellular systems are set to give a strong boost to the large-scale deployment of Internet of things (IoT). In the view of a future converged 5G-IoT infrastructure, cellular IoT solutions such as narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and device-to-device (D2D) communications are key technologies for supporting IoT scenarios and applications. However, some open issues still need careful investigation. An example is the risk of threats to privacy and security when IoT mobile services rely on D2D communications. To guarantee efficient and secure connections to IoT services involving exchange of sensitive data, reputation-based mechanisms to identify and avoid malicious devices are fast gaining ground. In order to tackle the presence of malicious nodes in the network, this paper introduces reliability and reputation notions to model the level of trust among devices engaged in an opportunistic hop-by-hop D2D-based content uploading scheme. To this end, social awareness of devices is considered as a means to enhance the identification of trustworthy nodes. A performance evaluation study shows that the negative effects due to malicious nodes can be drastically reduced by adopting the proposed solution. The performance metrics that proved to benefit from the proposed solution are data loss, energy consumption, and content uploading time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems are expected to connect an avalanche of "smart" objects disseminated from the largest "Smart City" to the smallest "Smart Home". In this vision, Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) is deemed to play a fundamental role in the Internet of Things (IoT) arena providing a large coherent infrastructure and a wide wireless connectivity to the devices. However, since LTE-A was originally designed to support high data rates and large data size, novel solutions are required to enable an efficient use of radio resources to convey small data packets typically exchanged by IoT applications in "smart" environments. On the other hand, the typically high energy consumption required by cellular communications is a serious obstacle to large scale IoT deployments under cellular connectivity as in the case of Smart City scenarios. Network-assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are considered as a viable solution to reduce the energy consumption for the devices. The particular approach presented in this paper consists in appointing one of the IoT smart devices as a collector of all data from a cluster of objects using D2D links, thus acting as an aggregator toward the eNodeB. By smartly adapting the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) on the communication links, we will show it is possible to maximize the radio resource utilization as a function of the total amount of data to be sent. A further benefit that we will highlight is the possibility to reduce the transmission power when a more robust MCS is adopted. A comprehensive performance evaluation in a wide set of scenarios will testify the achievable gains in terms of energy efficiency and resource utilization in the envisaged D2D-based IoT data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In next-generation Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, every object such as a wearable device, a smartphone, a vehicle, and even a sensor or an actuator will be provided with a digital counterpart (twin) with the aim of augmenting the physical object's capabilities and acting on its behalf when interacting with third parties. Moreover, such objects can be able to interact and autonomously establish social relationships according to the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) paradigm. In such a context, the goal of this work is to provide an optimal solution for the social-aware placement of IoT digital twins (DTs) at the network edge, with the twofold aim of reducing the latency (i) between physical devices and corresponding DTs for efficient data exchange, and (ii) among DTs of friend devices to speed-up the service discovery and chaining procedures across the SIoT network. To this aim, we formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear programming model taking into account limited computing resources in the edge cloud and social relationships among IoT devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is considered as one of the key enabling technologies for fifth-generation (5G) networks as it allows data offloading generated by the huge number of connected devices. In this respect, group-oriented services are among the most interesting usage scenarios. Indeed, D2D can improve the performance of the conventional multicast scheme (CMS) in cellular networks, which is known to suffer from low spectral efficiency. Security is a further key field of investigation for 5G systems, as any threat to privacy and security may lead to both deteriorated user experience and inefficient network resources’ utilization. Security issues are even more in focus for D2D connections between devices that are in mutual proximity. To improve the CMS performance and also sustain security requirements of the 5G network, this work proposes a secure D2D data transmission algorithm. Making use of mechanisms such as encryption and signature, this algorithm aims to protect the exchanged data and the privacy of the devices involved in the communication. A simulation campaign conducted using MATLAB shows the ability of the proposed solution to take advantage of the establishment of secure D2D communications and efficiently utilize network resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]